Who’s communally polarizing the electorate?

There has been two kinds of defence put up by BJP leaders for Amit Shah’s controversial speech in riot-ravaged Muzaffarnagar. One, the Congress started this sort of communal polarisation, by going to the Shahi Imam of Delhi’s Jama Masjid and getting him to appeal to Muslims to vote for the Congress. The other is more disingenuous. How can asking people to exercise their ballot be considered hate speech? Even US President Barak Obama has called upon voters to seek revenge by going out to vote. Neither form of defence stands scrutiny.

When the mahant of Gorakhnath temple not just exhorts his followers to vote the BJP but is himself a BJP Member of Parliament and a candidate in the forthcoming elections, is he being communal? When Baba Ramdev calls upon his followers to vote Modi, is he communally polarising voters? When the entire Sangh Parivar mobilises countless sadhus, sants and godmen of varied description in the cause of mobilising votes for the BJP, does that amount to communal polarisation?

The answer is in the negative. They do, indeed, mobilise a specific community, defined, in most cases by religion. But that does not make these acts of mobilisation communal. The Akali Dal is a party of Sikhs, for Sikhs. The Indian Union Muslim League is a party of Muslims, to look after the interests of Muslims. But this does not make either party communal. In short, mobilising a community for its own sake does not constitute communalism.

Then, what is communalism? Mobilising one community in hostility towards another community is communalism. Mobilising Muslims positing Hindus as their enemies would be communal. Mobilising Hindus, and calling upon them to unify, by invoking a threat from Muslims and rallying then against Muslims would indeed be communal. And this is precisely the difference between the Shahi Imam’s exhortation to Muslims to vote the Congress and Amit Shah’s call to wreak vengeance on those who had defiled Jat honour. The Shahi Imam’s call was community-based mobilisation. Amit Shah’s call, soliciting support for three candidates of the party who are also the prime accused in the riots, calling for revenge against the community’s enemies, amounted to communal mobilisation.

As for Obama’s revenge remark, let us appreciate that the context was altogether different. He was urging voters in Ohio, who were booing his opponent Mitt Romney for his scare tactic that Chrysler was going to ship jobs to China, to vote and not boo. The best revenge for such scaremongering would be to go out and vote, was Obama’s message.

The Muzaffarnagar context is something else, one altogether less anaemic. It is one in which blood has been shed, women have been raped and tens of thousands have been driven out of their homes and rendered refugees in their own land. Here, revenge is not an anaemic metaphor, but blood-thirsty invocation of violence against an enemy community, a call to rouse smouldering anger to new incendiary levels. To call this an attempt to channel anger towards a non-violent, electoral route is sheer sophistry.

If those leaders of the BJP who defend Amit Shah are truly convinced of the pacific intent and import of Shah’s comments, let them advise their supremo Narendra Modi to go and make the same speech in Muaffarngar. Or let them act as apostles of peace themselves and do this duty in Muzaffarnagar. Just to be doubly peaceful.